1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the data delivery and translation in personal electronic devices. More particularly, the invention relates to retrieving and transmitting data available across a network to personal devices using an adaptable protocol and server proxy client.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Personal data devices have become common accessories in today's technology driven society. When PDAs, text pagers, cell phones, and personal computers first came into the marketplace, each device had to have its own custom architecture. The initial systems paved the way for a multitude of communication and operating system standards.
However, the wide variety of devices have caused problems in the software industry. Application programmers must port their programs to each device's operating system and display capabilities. For example, one PDA may have a 160×160 pixel black and white display using the Palm OS while another uses a 180×240 color display using WinCE.
An application programmer must take into account the limitations of each device when creating the user interface for his program. Differing graphics capabilities between devices make it very difficult to achieve the same look and feel of a GUI across the varied platforms, for example. The application programmer must take into account that something that is easily displayed on one device may not be displayed on another or may not look the same between two devices.
CPU speeds also affect application programs. The efficiency of an application program must be tweaked for each platform in order for the program to be viable. Users do not want to use slow programs on their personal data devices.
Additionally, personal devices vary greatly in the available memory and whether the client software is stored in ROM. Small amounts of RAM make it difficult to manage data. While having a client software stored in ROM makes it difficult, if not impossible for the normal consumer, to upgrade.
All of these limitations create problems for application programmers.
A consequence of creating many different versions of a program to support different personal data devices is that it causes huge headaches in terms of supporting different code bases. Each code version must be debugged, updated and supported. When a data packet protocol or operating system changes, then so must the code base for that system.
One example is Microsoft Corporation's .NET framework which attempts to link together XML Web services in servers and clients. The .NET framework requires that all servers and clients communicate using XML and transfer information in XML. The result is a tightly woven network of XML services. This approach, however, requires that client devices process all aspects of the data being requested by users and displayed. It also requires application programs to be provided and supported for each differing platform. Additionally, the processing demand on the client systems require more powerful processors as the complexity of application programs increases.
It would be advantageous to provide a handheld client framework system that provides a client framework that is easily updateable from a host system and reduces processing demands on client systems. It would further be advantageous to provide a handheld client framework system that provides a programming language that is easily supported across multiple client platforms.